After writing for about three months, I finally got this question. Is it really that important to give the reader a boring introduction that you know isn’t that good?

For all the essays I’ve written from middle school to a week ago, I was forced to include an introduction. Somehow that habit stayed with me when I entered the world of freelance writing.

For just about every single article I’ve written, I have an intro paragraph as well. But as most of you writers know, the intro paragraph is the hardest paragraph to write in the entire essay/article. You actually need to prepare a draft for it, and go through the revision and editing process just for the little unimportant paragraph.

That same little unimportant paragraph has ruined some of the best ideas I had for writing. I remember brainstorming for ideas yesterday. It was one of the best brainstorming sessions I ever had. I ended up with a grand total of about ten to thirteen good ideas.

But then, I sat down to write articles based on them. That’s when all my creative genius died. I had no idea about how to start an article about the first topic. I kept on attempting to write a better intro for about twenty more minutes. Every intro paragraph I wrote, I thought to myself, “what a peice of crap!”, and I started over. By the end of the session, I was crying.

No, it’s not because I’m a teenage writer. It’s because my brain couldn’t take all that pressure, and just exploded in the form of tears (figuratively).

This has probably happened to even the best writers at least three or four times in their life. They think of one of the best ideas to write about, and then they abandon that same stroke of genius a few minutes later. Itget’s really frustrating really really fast.

So what could be the solution to this wierd form of writer’s block?

It’s a really simple solution. I first tried this a few weeks back and got three articles without any brainstorming. All you do is just start writing about whatever subject you want to write about. Just dump everything you had in your brain dealing with that topic. It’s a scarily effective way to produce article after article without any planning whatsoever.

After finishing the article, then go back to provide a title and a description. After that, just fill in all the other stuff, and submit it to wherever you want to.

There is a really good strategy to prevent or stop this. It’s called using media on your blogs.

Now, I really don’t blog anymore due to my need of fast money, so I don’t care if my blog gets ranked #1 or 1 million.But is it really that simple to earn big with your blog? Is it true that you have to just add media, and wait for the visitors to stream in?

No, not really. Adding media is a step towards making your blog more user friendly. If that happens, it’s likely that any visitors that do wind up at your site by any chance will likely spread the word to their friends about yourblog. That would create some excellent traffic to your blog virally.

Why does it work? Because most people don’t like to read. It’s too much work. Instead, they like to see stuff as it is. It makes it easier to understand, and if it’s easy to understand, people will most likely come back to the same place for more stuff just like it.

Now if you want to make some easy cash off of this, there is a very easy way to do it. All you have to do is embed ads on your videos. How do you do that? I don’t know, but that’s a way thatYouTube people make some money. If you’ve ever seen those AdSense units on some YouTube videos, then you know what I’m talking about. There are lots of people making money from their videos on YouTube.

This is one of the most popular episodes of the Jeff Dunnham show on YouTube. If you see the Martin+OSA ad I circled in red (it’s hard to miss), you know what I’m talking about. You can do this from a lot of other adsense like sites. ClickBank, Overture, and other PPC programs also work with this.

But for people that want more money from their blogs, you want to build traffic first. You need to use videos and pictures without any monetization whatsoever. Wait for some good traffic to build up, and then you can do all that crap.

Anyways, media is one of the most powerful agents of free viral traffic. It will get you a lot of followers, and is a huge source of traffic. But you shouldn’t just rely on the average Joe to come along and see all your stuff. Submit your site to search engines, ping it, find ways to putbacklinks to your blog to anywhere you can! Only then will your “media makeover” be complete.

But what happens if you don’t? Your own blog becomes your own, literally. No one will visit it besides you.

After writing for about three months, I finally got this question. Is it really that important to give the reader a boring introduction that you know isn’t that good?

For all the essays I’ve written from middle school to a week ago, I was forced to include an introduction. Somehow that habit stayed with me when I entered the world of freelance writing.

For just about every single article I’ve written, I have an intro paragraph as well. But as most of you writers know, the intro paragraph is the hardest paragraph to write in the entire essay/article. You actually need to prepare a draft for it, and go through the revision and editing process just for the little unimportant paragraph.

That same little unimportant paragraph has ruined some of the best ideas I had for writing. I remember brainstorming for ideas yesterday. It was one of the best brainstorming sessions I ever had. I ended up with a grand total of about ten to thirteen good ideas.

But then, I sat down to write articles based on them. That’s when all my creative genius died. I had no idea about how to start an article about the first topic. I kept on attempting to write a better intro for about twenty more minutes. Every intro paragraph I wrote, I thought to myself, “what a peice of crap!”, and I started over. By the end of the session, I was crying.

No, it’s not because I’m a teenage writer. It’s because my brain couldn’t take all that pressure, and just exploded in the form of tears (figuratively).

This has probably happened to even the best writers at least three or four times in their life. They think of one of the best ideas to write about, and then they abandon that same stroke of genius a few minutes later. It get’s really frustrating really really fast.

So what could be the solution to this wierd form of writer’s block?

It’s a really simple solution. I first tried this a few weeks back and got three articles without any brainstorming. All you do is just start writing about whatever subject you want to write about. Just dump everything you had in your brain dealing with that topic. It’s a scarily effective way to produce article after article without any planning whatsoever.

After finishing the article, then go back to provide a title and a description. After that, just fill in all the other stuff, and submit it to wherever you want to.

Also published at: http://writinghood.com/writing/the-hardest-parts-of-writing-part-one/

Freelancing is not for everyone, just like it says on those medicine commercials. Freelancing is a medicine in a way. It helps you make some good money in a small amount of time. In a way it’s the remedy for making money. Just write a few articles, make quick cash, buy whatever you want, and quickly get back to living life normally.

But this need for money can be insatiable, especially if you freelance for the wrong website. If you write for any company like Triond, Bukisa, or any pay per view site, you will never make the amount of money you want.

However, for a teenager, there is no other way to earn money writing besides writing for these sites.

So if you want to make some real money online as a teenager, just answer questions to paid surveys. You can get paid from five to fifty dollars to do them. There is no reason to be a writer, whether you are a teen or an adult.

At least, that’s what I think.

As a teen writer, HTML is something I really hate. It takes time to memorize all those tags, colors, and formats. I don’t have any time for that. I’m still on that goal of making three grand by writing within a month. I personally don’t have any time for memorizing internet language.

But the good thing is that most online publishers don’t make you use HTML. It is usually optional, just like wordpress. Even though it is the best publishing platform on the planet, it lets bloggers focus on their content instead of unnecessary programming language.

That is the same way Triond, Bukisa, and other publishing platforms work. It’s not like I don’t know HTML, it’s just that HTML is stupid. There’s no reason for us to use the <p> tags just to start a new paragraph, or an <h2> tag just to put a heading for a section.

For some publishing websites, it isn’t required that you make a heading or subheading big. All you have to do is submit your post with the heading you want to be big separate from the regular text, and let the editor fix it for you.

Who really has any time for HTML anyways? Especially if you are a writer.

I don’t know, but this is one challenge I’m attempting. Somehow, I need to make two hundred dollars in a month.

I know, I can easily make that money by ghostwriting, but, I’m just a teenage blogger, and I have no choice besides working for revenue sharing sites.

Many adult writers that work on Triond, which is one of my favorite writing site, complain about how they don’t make much money on Triond. Some of them make a few cents a day, and sometimes only a dollar a month.

Yet they don’t realise how they have a job, and writing on Triond has no effect on income. You might make a dollar or two a month, but does that really make a difference?

No, especially for a teenager desperate for money.

I’m not really desperate for money this time, I’m just in need of it. $3000 dollars to be exact.

Within that, there’s a lot of stuff I need to buy (soccer equipment, weights, clothes, etc.).

That is my conflict, and the same is the conflict of many writers. Especially teen writers. We can’t work, and our parents don’t want us to waste their wads of cash, so we turn to writing. Even in that field, we don’t get many oppurtunities. If we turn to sites that offer upfront payments, they slam their doors at us saying we’re not old enough. If we turn to ghostwriting, we face the same fate.

My question about this is why?

Why do we teens not get a chance to make money online? I mean, even Walmart lets fifteen year olds work, yet the internet blocks us minors out. What if we don’t have any choice but to write?

That’s where sites like Bukisa, and Triond come in. They actually let us post content for revenue. But even they have restrictions. They tell us “Sure, you can work” but they pay us horribly. One cent per view? Oh wait, that’s WAY too much pay for one measly view. They insist on getting us less than half a cent for every little visitor they get.

One day, I hope this injustice disappears, and teens get an oppurtunity to participate in the economy. True, we have to go to school, but what use is school if we can’t apply it to anything we do in the real world? Isn’t school the reason we can’t do anything? ‘Cause we ain’t edumacated enough, and school gets us the edumacation?

Shouldn’t we get to apply our knowledge a little before going off into the real world? I think we should. And for that, we need to write.

We make money (math and economics), we learn how to type (computer), how to read and write (English), and a lot of other stuff. Plus, it’s not like many teenagers are going to write online to make money. When the day comes when teenagers get an oppurtunity to write for professional sites in order to make money, I’ll probably be in Wal-Mart working, but I’ll be smiling.

All the amateur writers think that the internet is a huge place with a lot of users. Because of that, their content should get at least a hundred views a day, right?

Wrong.

There is so much content on the web, that only some content gets the hundreds of views a day. In fact, there is so much content, there is less people surfing the internet than the amount of content.

Yet, there are people paying hundreds of dollars for a simple five hundred word article. The principle is that the more  content a site has, the more the possibillity there is that a person ends up to that website. So then, websites try to  build up a lot of content.

But how do individual writers get views on their articles?

For people like me who don’t have the time for SEO, we can only hope someone will end up reading our articles. The more content we write for a website, the better the chances that someone will read it. But there is a trick here, too. When you write an article, chose a website to publish to that gets a high search engine ranking. That way, you can be sure that someone will read your content.

It happened to me just right now. I was just walking along minding my own business, when all of a sudden, I got this great idea for a blog post. I kept on thinking about it as I sat down to type it. Then, just as I made my way onto WordPress, the idea died.

Just like me, a lot of people hate when that happens. An idea just pops into their head, but just as they get to their computer desk, it goes away.

Some people try to carry a journal around with them wherever they go to record ideas. It’s a practical method, but what happens if you just happen to have a life, and you care about what your friends will say about you? You would  lose your social life from scribbling notes down about a new idea for an article.

So what can you do if you want to keep your life, and your job? Just look for ideas at a certain time of the day!

It sounds even wierder than going around with a journal in your jeans, and just as ridiculous as forgetting ideas altogether. So how does it work?

All you have to do is just get out your notebook and make a list of everything you did that day. From there, look for all the ideas you can find, and start writing articles. It’s as simple as that.

WordPress is the platform that everyone knows. No one cares about typepad, blogger is obselete, and most other platforms just suck. But why did I chose WordPress instead of all the other platforms that “just work”?

Because, WordPress “just works better”. Especially against blogger. While blogger has all the small stuff with a clean interface, WordPress has everything with an easy to use interface. Here’s the five things that make WordPress a beast:

1. Traffic measurements- In blogger, I was forced to sign up with google analytics and I had to constantly switch from blogger to analytics. Now that’s not what blogging is about now is it?

No, you should know how many people have visited your blog, and from where they come from. You should have these tools, or else, you’ll never know anything about traffic, which a blog should be awaiting.

If you don’t know who is coming to visit your blog, you can’t make it ready for them, can you? In blogger, you don’t have any abillity to track traffic, unless you use a third party code. But tracking traffic is a default in WordPress.

2. Space- If you have a video blog, this is very important. Same for a photo blog. Blogger doesn’t let you upload much media. You only have one small gigabyte of storage, which is too small even for a teenage writer for me.

I prefer the three gigabytes I get with WordPress. It’s three times as much storage than blogger, and it’s more room for pictures.

3. The interface- The interface is something that truly impresses me. It is just like the mac interface, only scaled down. The interface of Blogger is just like a peice of crap. WordPress is just awesomer in terms of interface compared to blogger.

4. Akismet included- It’s no deal for me, spam. I just don’t get any. I barely get any views, so spam is just something that’s really out of my blogging experience.

But if there is some form of spam in my blog, I can know that Akismet is on my side, and won’t allow any spam through my blog.

5. Themes- This should be self explanatory. There is much more variety of themes on WordPress. They are much more prettier than the blogger templates, too.

I might not need much as a writer/blogger, but whatever WordPress provides is exactly what I need to improve my blogging experience.

Writing is just as hard for teenage writers like me. It sucks. But the writing I did create over the summer is getting me a dollar every month on auto pilot. That’s a total of twelve dollars a year!